 | RADAREXHIBITION Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes explores the influence of Puginian ideals on Australian architecture. Rory Spence reviews the exhibition and discusses this fascinating architect, suggesting that there is still much to learn from his commitments and work.
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Annunciation window (1847), St. Joseph’s Church, Hobart. This Hardman stained glass was given to Bishop Willson by Pugin and includes the inscription: “Pray for the good estate of Augustus
Welby de Pugin”. Photo Tasmanian Museum and
Art Gallery.
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St. Benedict’s Church (1845-
56), Broadway, Sydney, before alteration. The
largest completed Pugin church in Australia, it
was sadly shortened and mutilated during
reconstruction to allow for the widening of
Broadway in the 1940s. Photo Cambridge
University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society
Collection.
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St. Paul’s Church (1851),
Oatlands, Tasmania. A fine example of Pugin’s
simplest idiom for modest parishes, built under
the supervision of convict architect Frederick
Thomas, after an 1843 Pugin scale model. Photo
Archdiocese of Hobart Museum and Archives.
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Silver chalice (1847), for wine of eucharist, made to Pugin’s design from a melteddown classical chalice presented to Bishop Willson by Pope Pius IX.
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Silver pyx (c.1841-43), for consecrated bread, decorated with wheat and vine motifs, symbolic of bread and wine of the eucharist. Made by Hardman. Photos Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
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Until recently, few people knew that the
great English Gothic revival architect and
designer A. W. N. Pugin produced work
specifically designed for the Antipodes,
though buildings in the Puginian idiom by
Edmund Blacket and William Wilkinson
Wardell are well-known. This fine exhibition
and superb catalogue by Brian Andrews,
continuing research presented in his
Australian Gothic, finally establishes the
extent of Pugin’s direct impact on Australia,
principally through the Roman Catholic
Church in Tasmania and New South Wales.
Andrews explores the patronage of
Pugin’s close friend Robert Willson, who
built Pugin’s celebrated St Barnabas,
Nottingham, and became the first Catholic
Bishop in Hobart Town, and of Sydney’s
Archbishop Polding. Bishop Willson was the
brother of E. J. Willson, who collaborated
with Pugin’s father on several important
books of Gothic details, and who was as
enthusiastic supporter of “Christian
architecture” as Pugin himself.
The exhibition has been produced by the
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and it
opened in Hobart on the 150th anniversary
of the night of Pugin’s death.
Pugin died insane at the age of 40,
having produced over a hundred buildings
and thousands of designs for unbuilt
projects, furniture, metalwork, stained glass,
ceramic tiles, wallpaper, textiles, jewellery
and book illustration, as well as having
written and illustrated thirteen books,
notably the influential Constrasts (1836 and
1841) and The True Principles of Pointed or
Christian Architecture (1841). He
transformed architecture and design in
England, forming the starting point for High
Victorian Gothic as well as William Morris
and the Arts and Crafts Movement, and he
had considerable influence in mainland
Europe. The impact of his theoretical
writings extends into the twentieth century
and can still be discerned today.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-
52) was an astonishing, tragic, but
thoroughly engaging fanatical genius.
Brought up and educated at home by his
eccentric antiquarian father and radical
forceful mother, he knew as much as
anyone in England about Gothic construction
when, by the age of fifteen, he designed
furniture for the refurbishment of Windsor
Castle and silver plate for the Royal
Goldsmiths. In his late teens he was a
scenery designer for West End theatres,
including Covent Garden, ran a interior
furnishing business and was bankrupted,
was briefly imprisoned for debt, and was
shipwrecked and nearly drowned in his own
boat off the coast of Scotland. By 1832, at
the age of twenty, he had been married and
widowed, leaving him with no money and a
baby daughter, and by the following year
both his parents were dead. This life crisis
and a small legacy from an aunt apparently
provided the impetus for his subsequent
independent practice (supported by his later
wives and family) which was fanatically
devoted to the revival of Gothic architecture
and design, in the service of the remaking of
a Christian Catholic society.
Enthusiastic, talkative, completely
unpretentious and often dressed in a working
sailor’s clothes, Pugin seems to have been a
most likable character. “There is nothing
worth living for but christian architecture and
a boat”, he once announced. He maintained
a 30 ton lugger which he used to rescue
shipwrecked sailors off the coast within sight
of his home on the cliffs at Ramsgate, while
also supplementing his income with salvage
operations. On his European travels he took
minimal luggage and carried his essential
equipment in his capacious pockets, so that
he was always ready to sketch some
medieval detail – perhaps the inspiration for
Australian architect Horbury Hunt’s similar
dress habits. Pugin practised largely on his
own, often singing while he worked, in his
house at Ramsgate, with the help of his third
wife and, from 1845, his one male pupil,
John Hardman Powell, the nephew of his
friend, the metal and glass manufacturer
John Hardman.
Through Archbishop Polding and Bishop
Willson, Pugin’s determination to promote
Gothic as the only style that was a true
representation of Christian values extended
to the Antipodes, much to Pugin’s expressed
delight. Bishop Willson took with him to
Tasmania a collection of Pugin-designed
artefacts, many of simple design to suit
limited funds, to form the basis of a Catholic
see entirely modelled on medieval English
precedent – a new “Gothic Paradise at the
Antipodes”. This included vestments, cheap
church texts with Pugin illustrations for
convict use, a bishop’s throne, metalwork, a
stained glass window, full-size exemplars of
stone crosses, piscinas, a font and even
gravestones, and three detailed models of
simple church designs that could be easily
copied by local builders with limited skills.
These models were the basis of the new
churches of Oatlands (1851) and Colebrook,
(1857) and additions to Richmond church
(1859). Willson also encouraged a young
local designer, Henry Hunter, to become a
Puginian architect, using Pugin’s
publications as a guide.
Sydney’s Archbishop Polding also
commissioned designs for vestments,
metalwork and seven church buildings – St.
Stephen, Brisbane (1850), St. Francis Xavier,
Berrima (1851), St. Augustine of Hippo,
Balmain (1851), St. Benedict, Broadway
(1856), St. Charles Borromeo, Ryde (1857),
St. Patrick, Parramatta (1859) and,
surprisingly, the second St. Mary’s Catholic
Cathedral and School, Sydney (1843-1865,
but never finished and now replaced by
Wardell’s cathedral).
Thus, examples of Pugin’s architectural
work, as well as his books and church
fittings, were present in Australia, as models
of correct Gothic work, alongside the early
efforts of Edmund Blacket, themselves based
partially on Pugin publications. The great
Pugin follower William Wardell then arrived
in 1858 to take up the mantle of Puginian
Gothic, culminating in his celebrated
Melbourne Catholic Cathedral (1858-1938).
The exhibition carefully traces the two
stories of Pugin patronage in Tasmania and
New South Wales. The display is dominated
by Pugin’s fine church plate and remnants of
his sets of vestments, but it also includes his
publications, full-size facsimiles of his
exemplar stonework, large reproductions of
his two Tasmanian stained glass windows,
brass rubbings, and architectural drawings,
early photographs and recent views of his
buildings. A set of working drawings for a
church in Guernsey, acquired by Bishop
Polding but never used, shows Pugin’s
extraordinary shorthand drafting, where few
lines connect, clearly carried out with
terrifying rapidity, but with his usual sure
sense of proportion and detail.
The exhibition is arranged with loving
care and thought, beginning with general
background on Pugin’s key ideas,
publications and buildings – principally St.
Giles, Cheadle (1841-46), his own house
and church at Ramsgate (1843-52) and of
course his great Houses of Parliament (1835-
52), designed in association with Charles
Barry. It also includes an excellent short
video on Pugin and his ideas and three vivid
extracts from his diary and letters as a gentle
voice-over in a later section of the exhibition.
The lavish catalogue, with every exhibit
illustrated in colour, is an impeccably edited,
beautifully produced work that is a major
contribution to Pugin scholarship. Rosemary
Hill, who is completing a new biography of
Pugin, has contributed an excellent
introductory essay, which must be the best
short introduction to Pugin’s life and times
available. Brian Andrews’ extensive,
meticulous essays and catalogue entries
(plus three by English Pugin scholar
Alexandra Wedgwood) are a mine of
fascinating material. Especially revealing of
Pugin and Willson’s fervour is the story of
how, when the Pope in Rome presented
Willson with a chalice of classical design,
Willson promptly had it melted down and reformed
into a gothic chalice, designed by
Pugin and made by his friend and associate
John Hardman.
The lineage of Pugin’s principles of
truthful design responding appropriately to
function, and his emphasis on reform of
society through design has been frequently
traced through the Arts and Crafts Movement
to early modernism. Pugin’s emphasis on the
architectural expression of the functional
parts of a building was explored by Le
Corbusier and is still a much-used and valid
method of deriving form. What the exhibition
demonstrates most movingly is the
completeness of Pugin’s vision of a Christian
society where the form of every artefact
relates closely to its function and every
decorative detail has a meaning. This is most
poignantly illustrated by a little pyx to hold
consecrated bread, decorated with
intertwining wheat ears and vine leaves,
symbolising bread and wine, the body and
blood of Christ. Many people today may not
identify with the Christian message, but we
would do well to take note of the ethical
purpose and search for human and spiritual
meaning in the things that we design, make
and use, which challenges the current
pursuit of the novel or fashionable image.
Rory Spence is a lecturer in architecture at the University of Tasmania. The exhibition is at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery until 10 November. It then tours to Bendigo Art Gallery, 14 December–26 January 2003, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 14 February–18 May, and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 5 June–20 July.
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| Bibliography |
Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin
at the Antipodes (Tasmanian Museum and Art
Gallery, 2002).
Brian Andrews, Australian Gothic (The Miegunyah
Press, 2001).
Paul Atterbury & Clive Wainwright, Pugin: A Gothic
Passion (Yale University Press, 1994).
Alexandra Wedgwood, ed. “Pugin in his Home”, a
memoir by J.H. Powell. Architectural History, vol.
31, 1988, pp. 171-205.
Phoebe Stanton, Pugin (Thames & Hudson, 1971).
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